The Journalist and the Murderer

"This is Janet Malcolm’s account of the writing of Joe McGinniss’s non-fiction book, Fatal Vision. Basically, Fatal Vision was written using the immersion technique of spending a great deal of time with the subject to get to the ‘truth’ of the subject. There is a bias in our culture towards the non-fiction dramatic narrative, as we think it is closer to the truth than fiction because the books overtly make those claims. But we know, of course, to make non-fiction ‘read like a novel’ that certain realities have to be massaged and Malcolm picks apart the choices that McGinniss made to do this in his book about an accused murderer. His subject, Jeffrey MacDonald, was accused of murdering his pregnant young wife and daughter and he co-operated with McGinniss because he was going to be portrayed as the wrongly-accused innocent. But, in the course of writing the book, McGinniss came to believe that he had committed the murders and also discovered that he wasn’t interesting enough as a subject to describe his own inner life. This is a huge problem with non-fiction. I’ve done immersion reporting, only to find out at the end that the subject I’ve chosen is a lot less sympathetic than I had realised. Once, I discovered a woman I was following may have murdered her child in a case that couldn’t be prosecuted because of physical evidence that was difficult to definitively evaluate. So I had to start all over with another woman. At the time what Malcolm found was vexing and disputed, though now we probably admit to it, even though it is ignored by people choosing which book to read. That famous line – ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible’ – is an overstatement. Yet it stands for a deeper problem. But the truth is hard to get out unless you are a journalist who is willing to be a turncoat, like Janet Malcolm. I think Malcolm’s approach is a model for the future of how journalism might work on the Internet, where space is not at a premium, and hyperlinking can divulge the process of reporting. I think Malcolm’s book, as it says on its jacket, ‘both exemplifies and dissects its subject’. That’s why it is more fully ‘truthful’."